You have used the word love in many different ways in many different contexts to mean many different things, but when your husband leaves after fifteen years, you maybe aren’t so sure you know much about it anymore. You do know a lot of people use that word in your direction, a lot of them. A lot of them. And sure. Your friends love you. It’s genuine, you know this, they love you, you love them. But there are levels, and this year, with the husband leaving, the levels of love received feel disproportionate to whatever levels of love you might have ever given out, lifetime. It knocks you over and down, the love, it’s too much, and you are obviously an impostor. You have the unique gift, you are sure, of knowing how to seem real, to seem loving and warm and friendly, but it raises concerns, if your primary purpose is to be thought of as a decent human, versus actually being a decent human. You have had an idea of yourself as bright enough and sort of fun to be around, but could you have been that good a friend to that many people, or did you somehow con a whole lot of people? One friend says Well if you did, either we’re all a bunch of dopes or you’re an evil genius. But your friends are not dopes and you are not a genius of any kind, unless evil genius is actually so accurate that even you don’t know it, like you’re a host body for evil, and it comes in the form of faking people out so you can get invited to beach houses and lake houses and Italian villas. Maybe you’re like that guy who pretended to be a Rockefeller, except not on purpose. You know you’re really just averagely kind, an average friend, averagely everything. You could even be okay with that, maybe we could all just try to level up to averagely kind, but having absorbed a lifetime of messages that say that we really shouldn’t be okay with averagely anything, that we should be happy and perfect and for sure we should be lily white and we should probably not be women if possible, you get to a place where the wrongness of you feels like the most real thing, and then when people love on you it’s all too much and you’re baffled and feel undeserving and then what the fuck.